A tipsy meandering about Obama at a friendly venue.
I have held off blogging on substance for a while. So much of my life seems claimed and counter-claimed by opposing forces looking to jam my time, steal it, scrape it, BS me out of an hour here and a half hour there for no good reason. I remain impatient that my apartment cannot easily accommodate my alternative lifestyle, to wit: present Daddy two days a week, quasi-half-assed bachelor nobody for the other twelve. But at least I am keeping it clean, orderly and safe for the little fellows.
Part of me is very excited about Senator Obama's recent close win over Senator Clinton for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. Part of me wants to get up in Obama's face and tell him I will curse his children and his grandchildren if his government fails to take its eyes off of Iraqi schools and start keeping an eye on my kids' schools a whole lot more than W the Underbrush Trimmer has done. Part of me wants to see public health care on the grounds that if the free-market Australians, New Zealanders, Irish and Swiss can do it and do it more efficiently, we should not lag. Then part of me remembers that ours is the government that put a horse lawyer in charge of FEMA, and who knows what tire-retreader or pest exterminator would run the health care system for 5% of the planet under Obama. I hear that Tom Daschle wants HHS, and I would like to think that Obama is less of a sorry piece of corrupt garbage than the current occupant.
If you are an American, you should know some of Langston Hughes' poetry almost by heart:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Hughes wrote this long before the 1968 riots in which Washington and many other cities did indeed explode from a dream deferred, indeed for a time derailed, by a white terrorist's bullet. In the minds of many Black Americans (and many others, no doubt(, a similar deferral, derailment, by similar means is all too imaginable.
More optimistically, I hope that the arc of history does indeed curve towards justice, that this brilliant American, though profoundly imperfect, may serve to move causes and forces in our history, our trajectory as a people. I hope that this brilliant leader's election against the mighty forces of John McCain's oratory may dislodge part of our logjam as a people.
A great deal of our national neurosis over race comes from the fact that white liberals were, practically, the political agents of change to improve the reality of Black civil rights and rights against discrimination in the public sphere (as opposed to the public sector narrowly defined.) While Dr. King's oratory was usually quite compelling and the marches and sit-ins and facing the dogs and facing the assassins who bombed, shot, and dragged many civil rights workers (black and white) to death were a moral witness, they were a moral witness to those who held the power: white Americans. It is well-known, and regarded with some embarrassment among some Black Americans, that the NAACP was founded and to some extent led under non-Black Jewish auspices. This awkward fact, putting Jewish liberals in the role not only of ally but in some cases of ill-fitting patron, chafes at some Black Americans. The back-drop of a significant amount of anti-semitism or at least indifference and antipathy among Black Americans (higher according to polls than among White Americans) comes from this fact and the willingness of Jewish Americans to claim an ownership stake in the civil rights movement's history. Jews are right to do so (to the extent that any group may claim any heritage as a group); Jews did suffer and were martyred in that struggle. But the awkward history is a reminder of racism as much as the beginnings of its defeat. This is not to reduce white liberals to Jewish Americans or vice versa, only simplistically to acknowledge a few points of a complex history. It's to recognize the wisdom of a simple button on a young African-American's backpack: "Do For Self." A remarkably liberating message, one that conservatives can also appreciate, I would think.
Compare the civil rights victories to, for example, the defeat of white Italian colonial invaders into Ethiopia in the last century (almost said "earlier this century....") The Italian colonists invaded and were repelled successfully. Ethiopia has many, many severe problems but the dysfunction of post-colonial politics and sociology are NOT among them. Accordingly, resentment of white Europeans is a lot lower in Ethiopia than in some other African countries and in the African diaspora generally. Doing for self is good politics, good sociology, good economics and good psychology.
Now Obama. It is absolutely true that African Americans cannot deliver Obama by themselves. African Americans make up 12% of the country; while African Americans can perhaps deliver Maryland or come close to it, they cannot deliver many other states against possible Obama losses among whites, unless Obama is very, very close to McCain among whites. Black Americans cannot deliver Michigan by themselves; while metro Detroit has a lot of Black residents, it has (per anecdotal reports) a lot of very race-conscious and black-hostile White people, with a routine hostility not well-known among white Marylanders. And Michigan really matters. But Obama is himself competing and winning against the greatest political genius and machine of the last 15 years: William Priapus Clinton and his savvy, technocratic and tenacious wife. No junior senator from Illinois whose opponent was Alan Bats&&t Keyes should be able to defeat Team Clinton politically; it's like the U.S. losing to Cameroon in war. Obama is doing for self, and for his community. (Yeah, I know that Obama did not grow up in the heart of Black America but if you are Jewish, you are still Jewish even if you grew up in Biloxi, Mississippi.) Nobody is handing Obama a cookie; he's taking over the whole bakery, replete with a small-donor fundraising machine that's about to pay off Hillary Clinton's campaign credit cards and about to batter Team McCain back onto that broken-down, lobbyist-laden bus.
My hope is that an Obama victory will be a partial undoing of the "curse," of the political and social impotence of Black America to win, to thrive. My hope is that Obama will constitute the "doing for self" that will spur a healthier perspective on race and sociology across the board in America. I think it will be easier for Black America to air some of its dirty laundry publicly to the healing effects of sunshine, once it's clearer that Black America can defeat racist garbage in an (approximately) fair political fight. It will be easier to ignore the bombastic Al Sharpton and the jurassic Jesse Jackson when the much stronger example is an Ivy League attorney, scholar and statesman in the White House. It will give Black parents a massive new example to show their kids: "I don't give a damn what __ is doing on the corner, you are the NEXT Black President, get your ass a scholarship so I can send you to Harvard!" No Pole would deny today that a Polish Pope made the difference against communism, though the Pope never fired a shot, raised a sign or marched.
We have seen some small hints of this in the elections of local and state officials like Deval Patrick in Massachusetts, Cory Booker in Newark, Adrian Fenty in DC, the inopportune rise of David Patterson in New York after Eliot Spitzer's fatal zipper trouble. But President? President?
I type now from Busboys and Poets bookstore and restaurant in DC, named after Langston Hughes whom one poet described as that "Negro busboy poet" by one famous poet of his day. Hughes, like Obama, had one Black parent and one White one, in Hughes' case a distant/absent White father. Hughes lived his life feeling neither black nor white, neither fully American nor fully not. To quote the busboy poet:
Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed-- Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There's never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek-- And finding only the same old stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope, Tangled in that ancient endless chain Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land! Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need! Of work the men! Of take the pay! Of owning everything for one's own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil. I am the worker sold to the machine. I am the Negro, servant to you all. I am the people, humble, hungry, mean-- Hungry yet today despite the dream. Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers! I am the man who never got ahead, The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream In the Old World while still a serf of kings, Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true, That even yet its mighty daring sings In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned That's made America the land it has become. O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas In search of what I meant to be my home-- For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore, And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea, And torn from Black Africa's strand I came To build a "homeland of the free."
The free?
Who said the free? Not me? Surely not me? The millions on relief today? The millions shot down when we strike? The millions who have nothing for our pay? For all the dreams we've dreamed And all the songs we've sung And all the hopes we've held And all the flags we've hung, The millions who have nothing for our pay-- Except the dream that's almost dead today.
O, let America be America again-- The land that never has been yet-- And yet must be--the land where every man is free. The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME-- Who made America, Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose-- The steel of freedom does not stain. From those who live like leeches on the people's lives, We must take back our land again, America!
O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath-- America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. The mountains and the endless plain-- All, all the stretch of these great green states-- And make America again!
Once millions of Black Americans get this massive, perhaps final, confirmation that "America is America" to them, we may all enjoy, and be, a better and healthier nation.